And I would need a separate blog obituary to lament the causes of its early demise – the onrush of pathetic incidents crowding my otherwise consistently pathetic life and and so forth.

Let us not digress. For a famed film maker at the Kolkata International Film Festival stated something to the effect of: If you are a young creative happy with your situation, you’re as good as dead. It is only if you are angry and frustrated with your condition, that your anger can be a possible fuel, a possible channel for greater things.

When I first heard this, I couldn’t help thinking of my future as a Nobel Laureate.

To say am angry is biting an inch off a mile long spaghetti noodle oodling out of your dinner plate.

The situation is bad. And this statement is the seed of coagulated history. (At this moment, I can hear the inner conciousness of this planet, impinged in trillions of homes and streets and shacks and whatnot gasping out this statement – so lets not do a hullaballoo out of it.)

Intelligently, let’s screen it down, The situation is abysmally bad for the creatives

I understand people fear them more and primarily before they come to admire them. Among the millions who aspire to the tag of a ‘creative’ and make copious extrinsic efforts to ‘become’ one of the haloed sections, soon fade away when they receive the surprising social reciprocation and come to understand the tremendous level of sacrifice and perseverance the title involves.

Some are unfortunate enough to be born one. A poet, an artist.

There is no becoming in being, in bare existence, it as simple as hunger, pain and sometimes love.

It is then when the problem starts, or ends. It is how you see it really. There is no escaping your existence as a creative – the voices in your head, the visions, the bent of your mind that gives you convictions herculeously stronger or liquidly weaker than others..you mostly live in extremes, you dream of rocks sprouting flowers and flowers splitting rocks, you write-sing- draw things that nobody understands and you grow into your own beautiful margin until some of you make the necessary mistake getting out to make money like the ‘others’

You where your poetry is scoffed and your slogans are commended

But…But…this wasn’t supposed to be!

You go where your art is ‘too good to be used’

You don’t understand…!

You go where your films are broken into inane sitcoms

This wasn’t meant to be…!

Are you, dear reader angry, like me? Then home you will run and Create. Create you will, despite and because of the limits. For Limits shall show you the way to cross them. Stay Odd. Create Dangerously.

(wink)

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Sara did not want to fall in love. Not with a large squint spilling from his eyes and climbing out like ants unto his face. When he looked at her, she wasn’t sure where he looked and it was a blob of pure insult thrown at her. He talked wonderfully and loved wonderfully, but Sara wanted to know his thoughts. His eyes, like two strangers at war sat with their backs on each other sat on a huge wall. Sara looked closely, magically deleting her orgasm, in a humid ghetto somewhere, against the heat of a bare bulb. She peered into the strangers and told herself over and over that she could not see love. What she could pretend to see was a mist rising between the two eyes, pushing them apart, his smile and his twitching mouth like cavalry on the war of the eyes.

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I tell you, it’s downright disgusting not feeling how you’re supposed to feel. It’s painful having opinions and beliefs so weird and unsanctioned by the societal God (of the society, of the households that holds discussion rooms over lost safety pins).

It’s infuriating not acting as people do, not talking as people do, not brushing your hair and giggling at lipstick colours, not striking up conversations with people just because you are related and not because you care to like them.

It is excruciating to feel that you cannot converse with just anybody. It is apocalyptic to realize you are handicapped in not wanting to, ever.

Yes, we come across the preserved and published diaries of literary and political consequence, of war victims, of famous writers. And we read them as novels. But think of the writer one moment..why does she write.

She writes for herself. A part of her strives to give permanence to the life and times through her eyes, and a part of it is strictly therapeutic – to ease the burden of secrets, those secrets that emerge out of pain and those that have no ear but the diary page.

Rilke, Bukowski and others have hammered home the point that I increasingly feel today – write if you must write. write if without it you will perish..

It is true that the urgency of taking the pain to heal oneself and even to make sense of the maze that is life has brought forth some of the masterpieces of literature. It is when the writing has intense objectivity that it gains universal subjectivity..

When the muse assists a writer to take the pen and let out his pain and experience it assumes the stature of Art, for that pain or laughter or angst or tears touches the Humane.

It is then that the objective situation becomes magic. A schoolgirl, a middle aged banker, a prostitute or anybody will adopt it as her child, and derive pleasure from a singular interpretation, that is close to her life’s context.

Somebody once told me the arts are what we make of it. We create our own arts. And these are our ways of celebrating the One.

Rise and keep your mind on the higher call. Soon, you’ll tide over and hit sands of gold.

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I wrote this today after fleeing away from a rather posh gathering of intellectuals discussing books over tea. From my road diaries, to you.

When I see the lingering vagueness in Picasso’s depiction of Paris’s nightlife, I have an inkling suspicion we are on the same page on this.

So I visited this this today. And it was crap. I think it’s too much of an effort anyway. If you gotto dress perfectly, say the perfect words, notice each and every nail in your body, what exactly are you achieving anyway? How much of honest creativity can flourish in these circumstances, I wonder? Beneath coats and fine teas, hushed conversations and restricted merriment, where are you going dear? Or maybe, and I’ve an inkling suspicion that this may indeed be the case, I may be of a different exotic species altogether.

What is creativity anyway? No, really. There must be coming a point in a writer’s life (I still don’t know why I squirm at the term) when you need to explore the meaning of the very word you are celebrating and claim to be a master of.

Like, what exactly is creativity anyway?

Is it me, Sreemanti Sengupta, escaping from a gathering of posh uptight writers and a publisher who dismissed my manuscript with a curt, ‘good but not our material’ thingy and sitting here in a dingy coffee house, writing away on my little notebook, while my rough black coffee, assured to produce a beautiful migraine attack, takes its own sweet time to cool down and suit my freakish temperature intolerant tongue-epidermis?

Or is it really there, in those uptight bosoms, those tight lipped hushed conversations, those muted lips sipping on the finest teas of the world?

Or is it indeed there in all the fakedom, the fact that we’re all trying to overcome skeletons in the cupboard, the fact that some of their accessories might have been bought right off the footpath and are being passed off as branded stuff?

Or is it me, a self-proclaimed intellectual, lost and disgusted in the world of real intellectuals? To the point of thinking that some of the people are even faking their sexual orientations to stay in literary fashion!

Or the me that is coping in my own way with my life, seeing some dreams fading away, like butterflies escaping a torn net that I can’t mend?

At this juncture of the argument, or whatever I’m trying to do here (a part of which is recognizably escape a distressing situation at home and reclaim the pen-on-paper routine ritual that I’ve always loved) I falter and stop a little and maybe sip on the potentially migraine inducing black coffee. Whatever I choose to think and say at this moment is really crucial, for it is that belief that I will seek consolation in, and it is a matter of another belief that we all seek consolations in beliefs, because absolutes always seem out of reach.

I have a feeling that frighteningly pure creativity is more than the power of invention or discovery. This, am in agreement with the thinker J. KrishnamurtI because it makes sense to me. It is more than the ability to invent new techniques, or new thought patterns, more than the ability to scourge your mind to do something different. Something that allowed me to write in The Odd Magazine‘s descriptor, “Different is a dead word. We are Odd.”

Creativity must be an exercise in freedom. It is rather difficult for me to explain, for I, alas, (still) am not in that zone. It must be this wonderful state, a close cousin of Alice’s Wonderful, where nothing is improbable or simplistic or difficult. It must be this world without adjectives that qualify or restrict emotions. It must be without limits. And notice, this world is in the mind. Inside is where the change starts. I am in the process of trying to believe this theory that a change in the mind is corresponding to a change in the outer world. If the mind-land is free and uninhibited, if the mind-society is without taboos and unknown of restrictions, then we have a case in point for the external world as well. Creativity must be a product of this free mind-land. An unshackled experience where you have the Midas touch without trying. It is the place where the muses are really your playmates and bedfellows. Or maybe, you haven’t labelled them as ‘muses’ at all, because it is as it is meant to be – obvious and natural! That is what happiness must smell like!

Now, since we haven’t got this state (as yet), we choose our paths closest to it. The short cut, that which suits you! These paths in fact must be our attempts to reach the Beyond Power (Most of us prefer the G word). It may be writing for me, painting for you, housekeeping for Mary, seeing his children grow up for Subhash! You get the drift, right?

It is through this path that we truly feel at peace, a sense of power, well-being, a light shining through. THAT must be, to my mortal understanding, our individual paths to the ultimate Understanding.

When I write like this, freely and without a qualm in the world for these moments, preferrably in perfect situations, against the winter sun, bang in the middle of Kolkata on a Sunday, in an apparent time freeze, things start occurring to me and linking themselves up, and I shamelessly digress, as I am suddenly conscious now, with an alarmingly long sentence that I will gratefully end here.

I remember now, that when I was terribly in love, I heard from somewhere that staring at your lover’s eyes can be meditative, ethereal, and I believed it, because I felt it (by this time, dear reader, the amount of beliefs that I have already expressed about me, must have given you the certain belief of my fickle belief system).

So you get it, right?

You search for the Power in your path.

I’m in this hyper non-judgmental mood so I’m not going to express what I would have in 99% of the cases. I won’t tell you that people have corrupted their paths. That probably in their tight lipped conversations, their shawl drawn smiles and their expensive teas, they’ve lost the sheer mystic of creating to the lure of intellect.

Because, if I tell you that their path is corrupted, maybe you’ll turn back and tell me some day, “Yeah so what’s so merry in your chipped nailpolish-freakish hair-lonely as hell – adventure trek dream path anyway?”

That may indeed be tagged as another form of corruption all together! Another camp, relative.

There must be sub-routes of our way to the Power.

The Fine Tea Vs The Rough Life

The Chipped Nailpolish Vs The Body Shop Muted Lip Gloss

The Open Road Harley Vs The Sundeck Cruise

The Loner Brain Rant on Sunday against Rusty Windows Vs The Intellectual Chatter

And the beauty as always, is the choice. The beauty, the agony, the distress. Well, that’s another choice anyway!

Like this:

This mad world. It sends shivers down my spine. Every time, I come to think of it. Every time I let myself make the mistake of thinking of it. The delectable taste of madness touches me and burns right inside. Closing my eyes, I can see what Yashodha saw in Krishna’s open mouth, the space, the sparkling rolling planets. And opening my eyes, its the world in the mundane and real. The tables and chairs, the tea boiling and spilling over because I’m just sitting here thinking without paying it any attention. This madness. It shivers me. As I imagine how it would be to be insane, to be Rumi, my sister, who is insane because and only because we don’t understand her. But who knows? Who knows, whether the way her brain cells are working is taking her closer to the truth? Why do I feel it? It burns, this madness. I like to feed on it. It’s inspiring. It is thrilling to burn out, like a shooting star through the sky, who doesn’t give a damn to what wish you earthling has inflicted upon him. It’s tired. It’s mad. It’s unburdening. It cannot carry your burden of wishes. It cannot be another totem of your endless desires. People like this are like a stake through my body. A burning stake, a needle stuck with Tantric verses. They’re mad. They’re mad at everything they do, say, want, feel, see. Their madness moves me. There is a brutal urgency in their breath, in their walk, a jig in every step. Because, life is running out of them. Because life is lived in measured steps. Because life is sane. Life doesn’t allow a Rumi, an autistic sixteen year old weeping over a radio. But life itself is the maddest I’ve come across. It is the consummation of madness. A living fountain, a spate of insanity. We are blips of a mad accident called Creation. We are constantly trying to beat insanity into saner shapes. In office ledgers, in science and in theories. But God, I tell you is this sane-insane being or nobody. This incalculable, infinite madness is what afflicts us. Is what makes us sad. Is what makes us beautiful.

Text: Sreemanti Sengupta

Illustration: Ana Vivianne Minorelli

This Shivers Me’ is part of a longer and collaborative work, First Person with Brazilian artist-photographer Ana Vivianne Minorelli. The work is on the look out for publishers. Tell us about takers.